Rawhide Flat Read online

  Crane led his horse past the station, crossed a stretch of sandy ground tangled with stands of prickly pear and brush, and stopped when he saw Rawhide Flat’s single street stretching away from him, a thin morning mist still clinging to the rooftops.

  The town was a typical collection of false-fronted saloons and hotels, stores, a livery stable and a dance hall. Crane couldn’t see it, but the clang of a hammer on red iron told him there was also a blacksmith’s forge.

  Opposite where he stood, according to the painted sign nailed over the door, was the Convent of Michael the Archangel. Accustomed to the adobe, Spanish-style missions of Arizona and Texas, the marshal was surprised.

  The convent looked like an ordinary schoolhouse, a bell with a dangling pull rope hanging to the right of the door. Moreover it was very run-down. The timber boards were warped, jerking out rusty nails, and if it had ever been painted, no sign remained.

  Wind and cold had weathered the walls to a silvery color and the mission looked like a prairie ghost fading away in the dawn light.

  Crane built a smoke and looked the place over more carefully.

  Presumably the nuns’ quarters were at the back and there would also be a chapel. He lit his cigarette and saw that the frame building was longer than most, and crooked, rusted tin chimneys poked through the peaked tar-paper roof at several places.

  He didn’t know if the nuns had taken a vow of poverty, but if they had, they were wearing it on their sleeves. It was as though they were happy to be punished for crimes they didn’t commit.

  Odd, the marshal thought—a ramshackle schoolhouse in a cow town that was no doubt making money hand over fist from the Comstock. Did Rawhide Flat harbor a grudge against the sisters or was it just indifference?

  Angrily Crane shook his head. Damn it, what did he care about a bunch of nuns? Their talk had gotten to him. They’d crawled inside his head and planted a seed of anxiety in his brain that had grown into a hanging tree and now he was dangling from a noose of self-doubt.

  He was not going to kill a nun, not today, not tomorrow, not any time. The entire notion was crazy. He pushed it from his mind, angry at himself, angrier at the sisters.

  Crane tore his eyes away from the convent and back to the street. No one was stirring this early in the morning. The only living thing he saw was a coyote that watched him briefly, then slunk into an alley.

  The marshal had the horseman’s distaste for walking when he could ride, but he led the buckskin into the middle of the street to get a feel for the town.

  Puffs of yellow dust kicked up from the horse’s hooves as Crane stepped slowly along the middle of the street. The saloons were still shuttered and dark. Strange that, because bartenders liked to make an early start to prepare for the morning’s business. The stores were also closed, their signs creaking in the wind, windows staring blankly at the brightening morning.

  The blacksmith had ceased his hammering and the town was hushed. But it was an uneasy quiet, edged like a knife. It was as though Rawhide Flat were watching him, holding its breath as it waited for something to happen. Even the gusting wind sniffed at Crane suspiciously, wondering what he was doing, why he was there.

  Ahead, the marshal saw a squat frame building about fifty yards beyond the town limits, its heavy pine door and single barred window facing into the street.

  The cabin had a brooding, unfriendly look, made worse by the pack of rooting hogs that grunted and slobbered a few yards in front of the door.

  It had to be the sheriff’s office and Crane quickened his pace, only to immediately slow when a stench hit him like a fist. The marshal had smelled dead men before, men long dead, and now he got a whiff of it again.

  Scenting blood, the buckskin jerked up its head, bit jangling, eyes showing white arcs of fear. Crane soothed the horse, then looked closer at the hogs, five huge black animals that must have escaped from a slaughter pen somewhere.

  Their snouts were stained scarlet, jaws dripping strings of saliva, and the thing on the ground they pushed and pulled was the body of a man. To Crane’s left a second body lay sprawled, but the hogs hadn’t yet started on it.

  Walking closer, the marshal kept the buckskin on a tight lead.

  The body ahead of him was too torn up to be even recognizable as human, but the one to the left had been a puncher, judging by the spurs on his heels and the wide-brimmed hat that lay a few feet from his head. A Winchester, half buried in dust, had dropped beside him.

  Crane swung wide of the hogs and their feast and stepped beside the dead cowboy. He hooked the toe of his boot under the man and rolled him over on his back. The face was blue, swollen, the purple tongue protruding. The puncher’s brown eyes were open, but, in the anonymity of death, held no expression. He’d been hit in the center of the tobacco bag that hung over the pocket of his shirt. The man had been dead when he hit the ground.

  Good shooting.

  The marshal’s bleak eyes flicked to the other man. Hog snouts were deep in his belly and his body was writhing and arching in convulsive movement as though he were being eaten alive. How he had died . . . well, now there was no way of telling.

  His cold eyes lifting to the sheriff’s office, Crane studied the place closely but saw no sign of life, though a line of smoke, straight as a string, rose from the iron chimney, carrying with it the smell of coffee.

  He led his nervous horse to the other side of the jail and looped the reins around a water pump, out of sight of the gorging hogs. He walked back to the door. The reaction from inside was immediate. The door opened a crack and the double barrels of a scattergun poked between the gap.

  “Mister,” a rough, tired voice said, “think carefully about what you’re going to say in the next five seconds. If I don’t like the sound of it, I’ll cut you down to britches high.”

  There’s a time for doing and a time for talking. Crane recognized this as a time for talking. Fast.

  “Deputy United States Marshal Augustus Crane,” he said quickly. “I’m here to take the prisoner Judah Walsh into federal custody.”

  “Step closer. Let me take a better look at ye.”

  Crane did as he was told.

  “Thought you was a bearded man.”

  “I was. Kept getting in the way of the bacon an’ beans, so I shaved it off.”

  “My name’s Paul Masterson. Mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about you. None of it good.”

  The man called Masterson laughed and opened the door wider. “Come on inside. I’ve got coffee on the bile.”

  “I could use some.”

  Crane stepped into the office, a narrow space furnished with a roll-up writing desk, a table and a couple of chairs. A potbellied stove stood in one corner with a smoking coffeepot. Next to the stove, a jumble of yellowed wanted dodgers and town ordinances was nailed to the wall.

  Beside those, draped in black crepe, hung a Civil War portrait of General George Armstrong Custer.

  “A great man,” Masterson said, seeing Crane’s interest.

  The marshal nodded and smiled. “Not anymore.”

  “I scouted for him once, back in ’seventy-four, during his first expedition to the Black Hills country. He was a fine gentleman, if somewhat headstrong in the pursuit of Indians.”

  Masterson handed Crane a cup of coffee. It was scalding hot and he quickly put the tin cup on the table. “Tell me about the dead men, Sheriff,” he said.

  He laid slight but significant emphasis on the word “Sheriff,” establishing the pecking order of the lawman’s narrow world.

  The marshal’s cold eyes were fixed on Masterson, but the man seemed unconcerned. “Three nights ago a bunch of the boys, punchers and ranchers mostly, got likkered up and tried to take my prisoner. They didn’t get him.”

  “You killed those two outside?”

  “Those two, and maybe one other.”

  “All your talking was done when you started shooting, or did you even try?”

  “Marshal,
beware of strong drink. It can make you shoot at sheriffs—and miss. The only talk those cowboys wanted to hear was gun talk. The ranchers were not in a conversational frame of mind either.”

  “Why didn’t you let them remove their hurting dead?”

  “Oh, they tried, later. But I dusted the ground around them with a few shots and they scampered.” Masterson’s smile was razor thin. “See, how it was, after old man Wilson’s hogs escaped and got to work on the bodies, I figured those boys would see what was happening and think twice before they tried to rush the jail again.” The sheriff’s glance went to the window. “So far they haven’t.”

  “Some might say that you gave them too harsh a lesson in civic responsibility. The dead men look like punchers, near as I can tell.”

  Masterson nodded. “Joe Anderson and Bill Paul-son. Both of them worked for the Rafter-T up Sullivan Canyon way. I didn’t know them very well, but as far as I recollect they were steady hands, but always on the prod. A tad too high-strung for their own good I always thought.”

  “And Judah Walsh was a puncher?”

  “Horse wrangler, but that’s not the reason the ranchers around here want him out of jail. Not by a country mile.”

  Crane tried his coffee. It had cooled some, was strong and bitter, and he drank deep. He was aware of a growing tension between himself and Masterson over the deaths of the cowboys and maybe one other.

  Both he and the sheriff were named men, and now they’d met like two tigers in a narrow cage. Crane sought some way to maneuver without pushing Masterson too hard.

  Masterson gave it to him.

  “I heard you were running with the Clements brothers and that feuding bunch down to Gonzales County, Texas,” he said. “Then I heard you’d killed the two Shadley boys in the Gem saloon in El Paso, and then I heard it wasn’t them but their pappy you kilt. I never did get the right of it.”

  Crane recognized Masterson’s talk as a friendly overture of sorts and he decided to play out the string.

  “The Shadley boys braced me in the Gem, saying something about Mannie Clements knifing one of their cousins,” Crane said. “We had words. Then they went for their guns. A day later Saul Shadley came at me with the six-gun, upset over the deaths of his boys. Well, I guess ol’ Saul wasn’t familiar with the rule that says a man with a pistol shouldn’t go up against a man with a sawed-off shotgun.”

  “You killed him?”

  “Yes. But he was notified.”

  Crane crossed the floor and poured himself more coffee.

  “All that was a spell back,” he said. “After the Shadley killings I was with the Rangers for a couple of years, did more chasing after Comanches than anything else. Then through Governor Hubbard I was offered this appointment in Nevada.”

  “And now you’re here in Rawhide Flat.”

  “Uh-huh, now I’m here.” Crane built a smoke, lit it, then said, “And you’re here. How did that come about? Last I heard you’d been shot trying to rob the Katy cannonball.”

  “You heard right. Damn rube passenger shot me in the ass with a .32.” Masterson’s eyes lifted to Crane.

  “Know what our haul was in that train robbery? A crate of bananas and thirty-five dollars. I was so vexed I went back into the carriage to find that rube and kick his teeth down his throat, blaming him for my troubles, like. But the next thing I know, he’s taking pots at me with another Smith and Wesson. I gunned him right there in his seat.”

  “So a pumpkin-roller shot you in the ass, you spent the thirty-five dollars and ate the bananas, then what?”

  “Then I got out of the railroading business. I took this job, figuring all I’d have to do is sit back in a rocking chair, drink beer and maybe buffalo a few drunken punchers on Friday nights.”

  “But it blew up in your face.”

  “Real fast. A week ago the Cattleman’s Bank and Trust got robbed of fifty thousand dollars, most of it in paper money, but also some gold and silver coin. Then everything went to hell in a handbasket.” Masterson shook his head, like a man pondering the fall of great empires. “Damn right it did.”

  Crane dropped his cigarette to the dirt floor, shredded it dead with the sole of his boot and said, “Take a deep breath, Sheriff. Then tell me about it.”

  Chapter 3

  “Marshal,” Paul Masterson said, “a lot of folks are getting rich off the Comstock, people who’ve never set a foot underground, merchants and cattlemen mostly.

  “The ranchers around Rawhide Flat supply beef to the miners and bank their profits right here in town. The local businessmen, store owners and saloon keepers do the same.”

  “So the fifty thousand was theirs,” Crane said.

  “Yeah, and in one day they saw their savings vanish. The profit margin for beef is thin, and now most of the ranchers are facing ruin.

  “They’re riled up and they’re mean and getting meaner.” Masterson nodded in the direction of the street. “You see one result of it out there. Once I counted among my friends the men who rushed the jail, tried to kill me and free my prisoner. No longer.”

  Crane poured more coffee. Then, his big Texas spurs chiming, he crossed the floor and sat on the edge of the desk. “Tell me about the robbery. Where were you?”

  “The day of the robbery, a widow woman who lives a few miles outside of town sent her daughter for me. The kid said her ma had trapped the wolverine that had been killing her chickens and asked if I could please come and shoot it for her.

  “I rode out there and it wasn’t a wolverine she’d trapped. That didn’t surprise me none. You seldom see those critters east of the Sierra Nevada. She’d caught a kit fox, so I shot it, told her to skin it out and sell the pelt next time she was in town.

  “When I rode back to Rawhide Flat, the bank had been robbed and two people were dead.”

  “Judah Walsh killed them both?”

  “Nobody knows who killed the bank manager, but Walsh admitted to shooting the female teller. Her name was Martha Spooner, an old maid who lived behind the bank with her cats. As far as I can tell, she gave Walsh sass and he put a bullet into her brisket.”

  “You went after the robbers?”

  “Sure. My posse killed three of them on the east bank of Lake Tahoe about ten miles to the west of town. Just about all the lumber around there has been cut to shore up the Comstock mines, so they’d no place to hide. We caught Walsh alive.”

  “And the money?”

  “The robbers had stashed it somewhere and only Walsh knows where it is. We searched for a couple of days but didn’t find a nickel.”

  Crane glanced out the barred window into the blue morning. Yellow dust hazed the air and from somewhere drifted the smoke tang of frying bacon.

  “The ranchers want to beat the information out of Walsh,” he said. “That’s why they rushed the jail, huh?”

  “Hell no. Judah knows he’s facing the rope for murder and bank robbery. Against a stacked deck like that, the only chip he’s got left to play is to tell the ranchers where the money is hidden. In return, he wants a fast horse, a hundred dollars and free passage out of the state.

  “The ranchers and just about everybody in town want to give it to him. I can’t blame them. If I were facing financial ruin I’d be inclined to agree.”

  “So they tried to rush the jail and take him?”

  “That sums it up.”

  “You tried beating it out of Walsh?”

  “Waste of time, Marshal. Walsh isn’t about to talk and put his head in a noose.”

  “Pity you can’t just shoot him.”

  “Yeah, isn’t it though.”

  Crane looked around the office. “You got whiskey here?”

  “Bottom-left drawer of the desk. Starting early, Marshal?”

  “It’s for Walsh.”

  “Loosen his tongue with booze, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “It’s worth a try. Now open his cell and leave me alone with him.
Sheriff, let’s do this nice and easy, like we were visiting kinfolk.”

  Chapter 4

  The door of the sheriff’s office opened into a short hallway and then into a room mostly taken up by a pair of narrow cells. Masterson unlocked Walsh’s cell, then closed the office door behind the marshal.

  Crane stepped to the bars and for a few moments studied the man lying on his back in the cot. “How you keeping, Judah?” he asked finally.

  The man’s eyes fluttered open. He turned, saw Crane and sprang to his feet. He almost ran to the iron bars. “The ranchers send you?”

  “Not yet,” Crane said. “I’ve come to talk”—he held up the whiskey bottle—“and bring you breakfast.”

  Horse wranglers don’t run to size, and Walsh was no exception. He was a couple of inches less than medium height, thin, wearing a ragged plaid shirt and baggy, stained pants that had once belonged to a much bigger man, and were tucked into scuffed, mule-eared boots. His skin was very black, his curly hair tight to his scalp.

  But it was his eyes that captured Crane’s attention. They were almost bright gold in color, and flecked with green. In a woman’s face they would have been beautiful, but in a killer like Walsh they were strangely incongruous, like emeralds in a cesspit.

  The man rasped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I could use a drink. It’s been a while.”

  Crane smiled, his hand on the cell door. “Mind if I come in, Judah?”

  “It’s a free country.”

  “Only for some of us, unfortunately.”

  Crane handed the bottle to Walsh and watched the man lift it to his lips and drink deeply. He reached into his shirt pocket and produced the makings. “Smoke?”

  Walsh took the tobacco and papers without comment and sat on the edge of his cot. His eyes lifted to the tall lawman. “What’s a United States marshal doing in Rawhide Flat?”

  “I’m here to take you to Virginia City for trial, Judah.”

  “No you ain’t. Them ranchers want to know where the money is hid and they ain’t about to let me go.”

  Crane thumbed a match into flame and lit the black man’s cigarette. “Tell me, and I’ll tell them, Judah. The fact that you told me where the money is hid to stop more senseless killing would sit well with the jury at your trial. You could say you’ve found Jesus and did it out of the goodness of a pure heart. Judah, there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the courtroom, mine included.”